Substitute Decision Maker
A substitute decision maker is someone who you choose to make decisions about your health care if you can’t. If you haven’t chosen someone, by law the Ontario government will assign someone to you in an emergency.
That person could be chosen legally like a court appointed guardian, automatically like your spouse or another family member. As a last resort, you’d have a public guardian and trustee assigned to help your medical team make decisions about your care.
A substitute decision maker is someone who you choose to make decisions about your health care if you can’t
If you haven’t chosen someone, by law the Ontario government will assign someone to you in an emergency.
That person could be chosen legally like a court appointed guardian, automatically like your spouse or another family member. As a last resort you’d have a public guardian and trustee assigned to help your medical team make decisions about your care. Let’s look at each one.
Legally chosen substitute decision makers could be a court chosen guardian, an attorney for personal care that you chose or someone picked by the consent and capacity board, a group of people that specialize in consent.
If you don’t have someone legally in place to make decisions about your care, a family member would be chosen automatically. That means it would fall to your spouse, parents or children, your siblings or any other relative to make your health care decisions.
If none of these options work out for you though, a public guardian and trustee would step in to make medical decisions for you and your medical team.
Here are some more things to think about:
– The court can’t use next of kin anymore, it’s not specific enough. Only a formal substitute decision maker title will be recognized
– If the person that would be your automatic substitute decision maker from your family is not someone you’d want speaking for you, make sure to choose a power of attorney that can legally fill the role
The most important thing you can do to make sure your care needs are taken care of in the way you want is to talk to your health care team, your family and your friends and let them know what your wishes are and who you’ve chosen as your substitute decision maker.
– When you pick your substitute decision maker, make sure that they’re willing to do the job and make healthcare decisions for you. Make sure they’ll be someone who will follow your wishes even if it’s not what they would want and make sure it’s someone who is confident enough to stand up for you and ask questions even when it’s stressful.
– You can help them by giving them all of the information now to make sure they’re prepared just in case they need it in the future. Don’t wait for an emergency to happen to have these talks.
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Length: Short (< 5 minutes)
Topics: Communication
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I am a Substitute Decision Maker… What Now?
A Substitute Decision Maker is a person (or people) who will provide consent or refusal of consent for care and treatments for you if you are not mentally capable to do that for yourself.
Continuing Power of Attorney
Continuing Power of Attorney is a legal document to give another person legal authority to make decisions about their finances and property, (not about their personal health or care) if they become unable to make those decisions themselves.